Wednesday, September 14, 2011

India Innovation Summit- CII- Day- 2





Innovative Approach for Higher Education and Research

  • Rishikesha Krishnan, Professor of Corporate Strategy and Policy at IIM Bangalore, chaired the session and observed that Bangalore long had prestigious research institutions like the Indian Institute of Science and several Defense R&D laboratories. But it’s a new generation of relatively young institutions that have the potential to change the innovation landscape of Bangalore. In concluding the session, he observed the importance of integrity of purpose in building strong institutions - there can be no compromise on the core mission of the organization. The experts emphasized the importance of carrying people with them, and infusing a sense of purpose to overcome barriers. They felt that team work was imperative to achieve excellence, and to meet the high bar placed by international competition and societal expectations.  
  • Warren Greving, Director of Srishti Labs, observed that Design Thinking underlies translation of R&D to products and services. He is creating a research school that is part of a design school to design services back to industry, with the considerations being: 1) Importance of creating or recreating new organization; 2) Value of divergent and convergent thinking. Most of what we do is convergent but you need to mix both; and 3) Diversity in India should be a driver of creativity and india has a tremendous asset of it. Often vision needs to accommodate what others have. This would lead to a bigger vision. 
  • K VijayRaghavan, Director of National Centre for Biological Sciences (TIFR), made a call for non-linear research. He said that the British never intended the growth of science in India, and the early scientific leaders – Satyen Bose, JC Bose, Ramanujam, Raman and Meghnad Saha – were accidental geniuses, not the result of deliberate institutional outcomes. India climbed on the Science bandwagon after independence and set up a whole range of new institutions. But these institutions tended to stagnate unless propelled by visionary leadership. Again, success was inspite of, rather than because of, the system. Today, we are entering a new phase of institution building. The people attracted to these institutions have been trained at the best institutions in the world, and now its up to the new Indian institutions to help them achieve non-linear results. On creating a culture of innovation, he said that once you choose, explore the boundary. Leadership should be a lack of repression! Much of what it is now is repression. Another quality-  Don't compromise. This should be institutional.
  • Anurag BeharCEO of Azim Premji Foundation, gave background about Wipro's initiatives on education and the need to create organizational structures that are aligned with reality.  In his view, while we have thousands of schools and teachers, we have not created the education support infrastructure – experts in content, pedagogy, and delivery – that can help the school system deliver effectively. This is the gap that the two Azim Premji institutions seeks to close. Since we have a lag in this area, we often don’t have the resources readily available, and the challenge is to scale up through internal capacity development. A critical element of the APF philosophy is that the concepts and practice have to work closely together – all ideas have to be tried out in the field, not just restricted to academic writing.On people's working style, Anurag opined that Indians work differently. Here focusing on teams is very critical as firms can't afford to have distracting dynamics arising from personalities or credentials. It's the integrity of purpose that bind teams.


Innovations in Healthcare – Technology and Affordability

  • Ashwin Naik, CEO and Co-founder of Vaatsalya Healthcare, talked about his efforts in creating healthcare facilities in tier-2 and tier- 3 cities and how one needs to rethink of business models when doing business there. With mounting cost pressure, need is to think of services and not just new technology. Rural healthcare emerges as one of the greatest applications of technology, eg: Rural Kiosk. 
  • Arjun Kalyanpur, CEO of Teleradiology Solutions, spotted a huge shortage of radiologists in India, especially in rural parts and devised the teleradiology solution. Sighting instances of current installations and expansion plan, Arjun said that there is process innovation, but also needed is tech innovation, for eg mobility.  
  • Harish Lalchandani. Marketing Director - South Asia of Wipro GE Healthcare, warned that our problematic lifestyle is fast making India the cardiac, cancer and diabetic capital of the world. So stressing is the country's infrastructure. Availability, quality, and cost are the major challenges, so GE mandates that all of these challenges are met in their innovations. 


Nurturing Innovation - Country / Region Approach

  • Peeyush Ranjan, Managing Director, Google India R&D, defined innovation at Google to be "introduction of something new". The 10 rules of innovation from Google are: 1) Hire the best; 2) Empower them - speak up; 3) Put users first; 4) Have a well understood vision; 5) Value teamwork; 6) Share information; 7) Iterate; 8) Be data driven; 9) Provide an escape valve (20% time anyone can do what they need to do); and 10) Persevere (hard work). 
  • Neil Pollock, Head of Integrated Managed Services Business at Bharti said that nurturing innovation depends upon the way we educate our children. It's about how much you value innovation? It must not be platitudes. If you don't recognize, reward or prize it you will stifle innovation. The earnest thing for creating a culture of collaboration is trust and it's important to focus on retaining talent.
  • Paul Marchal, Director R&D of IMEC, said that India is in a great need of innovation, especially human-centric, top down, big multi-disciplinary initiatives. Caution- Don't think you are the smartest kid on the block, if you want to nurture innovation!
  • Deepu Chandran. Director of Innomantra, drew from his practice that even small companies are manage innovation well. Often firms expect people to innovate, but fails to tell how! So the result is chance innovation. Identified ingredients of innovation are: expertise, creative thinking and motivation. Innovation gets killed in firms when people don't know what to do with their ideas.
These were the talks made and insights shared. Now here's some more for you to ponder over:
  • Innovation is curiosity vs purpose, in balance
  • If a start- up is not internet delivery model we are ok, but where it has engineering component we are not there
  • In India, capital comes with advice but expert advice comes without capital
  • In India, many entrepreneurs do not have field experience at young age which is critical. This may likely end up in a prescription based model rather than a discovery based model for companies
  • Financing models are not aligned to cash flows in rural areas so innovation is needed in business model
  • Hire employees to be entrepreneurs, train them and cut them loose. But shelter them in corporate partnerships to incubate entrepreneurship 
  • Research is an enterprise activity, integrate centralised effort with dispersed field efforts

India Innovation Summit- CII- Day- 1




Inaugural Session- "Making Bangalore the Innovation Hub of Asia"

  • Kris Gopalakrishnan, the Chairman of CII's Southern Region set the agenda by highlighting the unique position that Bangalore has as an innovation destination. With a proven record in IT/ ITES, the city also has a rich talent for biotech, aerospace and medical education and is a vibrant talent base with presence of various global companies. This ecosystem of collaboration helps connect the dots and with further support from government, the future holds promises of this city and the region. A case in point: in recent past, over 1.5 million jobs got created by the knowledge sector as again 200,000 by all other sectors, combined. The session further reflected on rate of change for India in next 20 years and the impact digital consumer citizens, pervasive computing and flattening of the world will have on new business opportunities. 
  • Ajay Nanavati, Managing Director of 3M India, reflected on Bangalore as a hub of serious innovation in the space of aerospace engineering and biotech. 3M happens to have India's largest R&D center and one of the fifth largest in the world, with the intent of leveraging this center for innovation for India and a hub to take innovation out to the world. The key for successful innovation in Ajay's view was to stick to the investment in good as well in bad times. 
  • Praveen Vishakantaiah, President of Intel Technologies India, furthered the discussion with insights on how various economic cycles help build innovation. There's also a call for innovation at times of low growth.
  • Sridhar Mitta, Managing Director of NextWealth Entrepreneurs, had a call for diverse talent and its role in promoting innovation.  Drawing on a research study conducted at the Stanford University, Sridhar talked about the Silicon Valley vs Bangalore- Israel- Beijing research triangle, concluding that the uniqueness of Silicon Valley may get dwarfed by the diverse talent coming in from this triangle. He concluded the session appealing that chaos is the best time for innovation to emerge. 

Bangalore as a Hub for R&D in Asia

  • Vivek Mansingh is the President, Communication & Collaboration Group at Cisco India, shared that Cisco spends over 4 to 5 million in R&D in India and has over 700 patents from here. The firm has created a conducive environment to perform number of innovation programs for developing products for emerging markets, such as Cisco Campus which is currently being used by Cisco in Bangalore. Vivek maintained that while education is the key the innovation, equally important ingredients are: talent, leadership, physical infrastructure and academia relation. Talking about leadership profile of technology talent- T-shaped competency and soft skills are to be looked out for. 
  • P Gopalakrishnan, Director of  IBM India Research Laboratory, stated that R&D in India is 'small r' and 'Big D', but tide is shifting slowly towards more focused research work. One instance being IBM doing remote mentoring - IBM pushes problems that university students can pick up and are assigned mentors - close to 200 people are mentoring teams of 3-4 students, such that it is scalable- and giving guidance on technology and presentation. Gopal also reflected on connecting Physical World to Digital World, e.g. real time traffic modeling, hence applying different tolls suiting Indian conditions.
  • Shouvick Mukherjee, VP and CEO of Yahoo! India R&D,  stated that India needs to transform itself from R&D-centric to Customer- Centric Innovation Hub. This calls for appreciation of market dynamics, insight about the unmet needs and designing a solution from thereon. Shouvick maintained that it's tough to figure out global needs as opposed to being influenced by Indian requirements. Some of the issues remain, such as, talent with domain expertise, people who can think of problems that haven't been solved, opening up to universities and above all- passion. One best practice shared was Hack Programs , where Yahoo! works with startups to benefit from what they are doing and allow the community to leverage Yahoo's platform. 

Bangalore – A hub for advanced engineering beyond IT

  • Ajay Nanavati, Managing Director of 3M India, started this session with the famous quote from 3M "Research is the transformation of money into knowledge. Innovation is the transformation of knowledge into money". He identified 7 habits of Innovation @ 3M, viz: Leadership committed to innovation; Maintain the corporate culture actively (spends 5 -7% on innovation); Broad base of technology; Networking for innovation; Set outstanding expectations and reward; Quantity efforts; and Get close to the customer (capture unarticulated needs and have high tolerance for failure). 
  • Sanjay MCorrea, Managing Director of GE's JFWTC talked about the focus of the Center on emerging markets, for instance the MAC 400 ultra portable ECG machine designed and developed here in India keeping in view Indian market. This has been a result of structured approach to capturing the Voice of Customer, which contributes to about 90% of contribution to any new innovation (10% being Blue Sky Thinking). In numbers, the center has $200m investment and 1,000+ patents filed. 
  • Venkatesh Valluri, Chairman of Ingersoll Rand, impressed upon building products through innovation convergence. The three phases of innovation as: Innovation through value creation; Innovation through convergence and finally Open Innovation.  Productivity earlier was about costs and now it is not about cost. More importantly when you want to reverse engineer and take costs out that is where productivity is seen. One of the best practices shared is: Entrepreneur creation program, where the firm hires talent, train them and then after two years send out so that they create business and IP. Their IPR teams then work to value IPs jointly. This calls for maturity and transparency within the company and in community.
  • Vijay Ratnaparkhe, President and Managing Director of Robert Bosch Engineering and Business Solutions, defined innovation as new product for Bosch. These could be invention driven innovations or opportunity driven innovations. He talked about nurturing the culture of innovation via systematic creation against specific challenges. 

Bangalore – A hub for disruptive innovation – A startup view

  • Sudhir Sethi, Founder and Chairman of IDG Ventures, started by highlighting the trend that domestic companies are buying Indian products and there's been a increased focus towards developing product for the Indian market. There's been over $ 3.3 billion of venture funding happened in recent years, of which 36% has gone to Bangalore. 
  • Mallikarjun Sundaram, President and CEO of Mitra Biotech, said that it's the ecosystem of companies that drove him to Bangalore from the US. Thought India gives an access to talent from domestic as well multinational firms, the funding market isn't that vibrant yet. 
  • Sanjay Nayak, CEO and Managing Director of Tejas Networks,  started with a stark fact that this decade India would be importing over $1 trillion of telecom and networking equipments, making it as one of the largest contributors of trade deficit. Coupled with this large market, India now offers experience in product lifecycle management and serious cost advantage. What ever is done in India is increasingly relevant to both developed economies as well other emerging economies, making this an opportune place and time. Strategy is to leverage domestic market to scale quickly.
  • Rohan Parikh, Head of Green Initiatives and Infrastructure at Infosys, threw light on Infosys' green initiatives. Instances being: Smart Devices allowing people to monitor and regulate energy consumption via sms, etc and other power saving technologies currently being developed and tested at Infosys.

Seventh India Innovation Summit- 2011



The Seventh India Innovation Summit, jointly hosted by CII and  Karnataka Government, got concluded last Friday evening at Hotel Leela Palace, Bangalore. Attended by over 500 delegates from across the country, the two day event did live up to its expectation of sharing insights and practices on innovation drawn from various institutions, large and small. Though I could not be a part of the event (owing to my end-term exams here at IIM Bangalore), the 'Network Effect' did work. My mentor, GS Nathan painstakingly took notes for me to share with you and help evangelist the spirit of Innovation. I owe it to Nathan.

Kindly share the note within your community. Also feel free to add to it online (at http://cii-innovation.blogspot.com) or by writing back to me on innovation.evangelist@gmail.com. Happy reading.